Washington, D.C.,
February 28, 2014– Sixty years ago, on 1 March
1954 (28 February on this side of the International Dateline), on Bikini Atoll
in the Marshall Islands, the
U.S.
government staged the largest nuclear test in American history. TheBRAVO shotin
the Castle thermonuclear test series had an explosive yield of 15 megatons,
1000 times that of the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima and nearly three times the 6
megatons that its planners expected. To recall this shocking event the National
Security Archive posts today a selection of documents about the BRAVO shot and
its consequences, mainly from State Department records at the National
Archives.

The 15-megaton Castle BRAVO
nuclear test, 1 March 1954, created a crater a mile wide and spread radioactive
fallout around the world. The mushroom cloud rose to 130,000 feet and broadened
to more than 25 miles in diameter. Excerpt from U.S. Air Force documentary film,Joint Task Force 7 Commander's
Report, OperationCastle.

Castle BRAVO spewed radioactive fallout around the world and
gravely sickened nearby inhabitants of the Marshall
Islands, then under a U.S. trusteeship, and 236 were
evacuated as well as 28 American military personnel on a nearby island.
Twenty-three Japanese fishermen were also contaminated, which made the test
known to the world and roiled U.S-Japanese relations. While the U.S. government claimed at the time that a shift
in the wind spread the fallout far from the test site, a recent U.S. government
report demonstrates that it was the volcanic nature of the explosion that
dumped the fallout nearby. The adverse health effects for inhabitants of
Rangelop Atoll, 110 miles away from the test site, were severe and some islands
remained uninhabitable for years. This radiological calamity had a significant
impact on world opinion and helped spark the movement for a nuclear test
moratorium which ultimately led to the 1963Limited
Test Ban Treaty.

Included in this posting is a U.S. Air Force documentary film on
the Joint Task Force 7 commander's report on the Castle Series. It includes
footage of the BRAVO shot as well as coverage of the evacuation of U.S. personnel
and Marshall Islanders in the wake of the test. The documentary is sanitized at
points apparently to protect nuclear weapons design information. A Freedom of
Information request by the Archive for a fresh review and a subsequent appeal
failed to dislodge more details.

Documents in this posting include:

Japanese government accounts of theFukuryu Maruincident

The May 1954 petition by Marshall
Islanders for an end to nuclear tests in the area

Why and how exactly U.S. scientists miscalculated the yield
remains classified but what made the 15-megaton Bravo shot the worst nuclear
test in U.S. history is no secret. The device detonated on an islet in a coral
reef, producing massive levels of fallout that quickly reached the stratosphere
before falling to earth. It is worth comparing BRAVO to the most powerful
nuclear test ever, the Soviet Union's
50-megaton "Tsar Bomba" of 30 October 1961. That test's radiological
consequences were far less severe because the "Tsar Bomba's" fireball
never touched the earth's surface producing significantly less fallout than
BRAVO. Historian of scienceAlex Wellersteinhas
written that Castle BRAVO is a "cautionary tale about hubris and
incompetence in the nuclear age — scientists setting off a weapon whose size
they did not know, whose effects they did not correctly forecast, whose legacy
will not soon be outlived."[i]

While the "Tsar Bomba" was almost immediately known to
the world, the architects of the Castle test series worked in secrecy; the
Eisenhower administration wanted to keep words like "hydrogen" and
"thermonuclear" out of public discourse and only the fact that tests
would be held in the Pacific in 1954 went to the public. After the BRAVO shot
occurred, the AEC and the Defense Department sought to control what could be
known about the event. But the cat was out of the bag when theFukuryu Marucrew returned to port which gave Washington a serious
damage control problem as information about the 1 March test began to reach the
public. At the end of the month AEC chairman Lewis Strauss gave a generally
misleading press conference about BRAVO but he managed to alarm the public when
he acknowledged that hydrogen bombs could be "made large enough to take
out a city … any city."[ii]

Until recently, an extensive collection of documents on nuclear
testing in the Marshall
Islands was readily available on a
Department of Energy Web site, The Marshall Islands Document Collection. It no
longer has an on-line presence. In the fall of 2013, at the time of the U.S. government
shut-down, this important collectiondisappearedfrom
the Web. It is unclear whether the Department intends to restore it as a
distinct Web page. Many documents on the Marshall Islands can be found on
the Energy Department'sOpenNetbut whether they are essentially
the same items is also unclear at present. Moreover other documents on nuclear
testing in the Marshall
Islands that the Energy Department
declassified in the 1990s and were once available at the National Archives or
on-line were reclassified early in the last decade after the Kyl-Lott amendment
went into effect in 1999.[iii]

Unique non-U.S. government documents about the consequences of
nuclear testing in the Marshall
Islands are also at risk. The case files of
the Nuclear Claims Tribunal for the Marshall Islands, which went out of
existence in 2010, are an irreplaceable record of the impact of nuclear testing
on a vulnerable population. The collection of paper records resides in a
building in Majuro, the MarshallIsland's capital city,
but no arrangements are in place to assure their long-term preservation.[iv]

7 hours ago -"Nuclear VictimsRemembrance" atMajuro, Capital of the
Republic of the...Washington, D.C., February
28,2014– Sixty years ago, on1 March....."immediately"
after the test, but that did not occur until twodayslater, after ...

Feb 20, 2014 -Commemorations inMarshall Islands, Japan and at the
Clinton...bomb tested by the
United States,NuclearRemembranceDay 2014is a date to reflect on
our sharednuclearlegacy, honour survivors
andvictims, educate the ...

NINE
DEGREES NORTH is Released

February 20

6:202014

On March 1, 1954, the United States detonated the largest nuclear bomb
in its history on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Sixty years
later, former Marshall Islands resident Kim Klein and her partner Michael
Bayouth, are calling upon the world to commemorate â€œIllumination Day,â€' and
bring worldwide attention to this atrocity on humanity that should never be
forgotten and should never happen again.

On March 1, 2014, people from
all countries are asked to join together online and in their communities to
educate, pay respect, and honor the Marshallese people affected by the Castle
Bravo test, which was 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Klein and Bayouth's social media
campaign onFacebook for â€œIllumination
Dayâ€'hopes to collect
60,000 shares of their Illumination Day candle through March 1, 2014, in honor
of this yearâ€s 60th anniversary.

To help bring awareness to this
global issue, Klein and Bayouth, authored the novelâ€œNine
Degrees Northâ€', a coming-of-age story which chronicles the dramatic
â€œfall-outâ€' of six teenagersâ€ lives while living on Bikini Atoll in 1969.
The book is available in both e-book and paperback here onAmazon.com.

Understanding firsthand how the
blast affected Marshall Islandâ€s residents, the authors felt compelled to
share their unique perspective with the world and write their novel as a
think-piece to bring awareness to the long-term physical and emotional
consequences and devastation left by nuclear bombs.

Feb 20, 2014 -FormerMarshallIslandsresident Kim Klein and
Michael Bayouth, authors of...2014as an annual
international tribute to theMarshallesepeople. The public is
encouraged to "share" their online "Illumination Day" candle in ...

Join the event as we honor & pay
respect to theMarshallesepeople, their culture
& the islands they call home by reposting this candle on March 1,2014~...To Honor Victims of
Largest USNuclearBlast - Now Thru 3/1/14Illumination Day.

7 days ago -...holiday in theMarshall Islandsmarking thedaythe Bravo hydrogen bomb...This year's 60th
anniversary is being marked inMajuro— and other...to reflect on the fact
that the USnuclearweapons test legacy has
left...Read more about this in
the February 28,2014edition of theMarshall IslandsJournal.